The fact that is less popular now, being replaced as the "new shiny" by JS and Python as gotten alot of new devs out of the space which is what caused the vast majority of the negative press around php, it was never the language, but the fact that is was very approachable and very forgiving for new devs so alot of them did stupid things
That's just, not correct. I programmed web sites primarily in PHP back in the PHP3-5 days (and have had some jobs and contracts since, in PHP7+).
PHP, pre-5.3ish, was a bad language. It had terrible design decisions, a polluted global space, bad default configurations, weird scoping rules, function/objects with massive security holes that the developer had to patch around (the MySQL functions, being notorious) and a terrible object model. PHP5-5.3 did a lot to fix that, and 5.3+ became a usable language. PHP7 finally did a ton of work to clean up the global environment, deprecate and toss out old/buggy libraries, clean up the ABI and improve performance. They also reworked the object model completely. It is now a genuinely decent language. But it was not "always great".
Besides echoing the sentiment that PHP ~3-5 was definitely NOT a good language, I don't know what you mean by new shiny. JS is like 6 months newer than PHP and python is like 4 years older.
The fact that is less popular now, being replaced as the "new shiny" by JS and Python as gotten alot of new devs out of the space which is what caused the vast majority of the negative press around php, it was never the language, but the fact that is was very approachable and very forgiving for new devs so alot of them did stupid things